Abundance
by NezumiPi
Summary: Deke has a little trouble adjusting to life in present-day America. To her own surprise, Yo-Yo sympathizes.


"You!" Yo-Yo pointed at Deke, who immediately began to look around in hopes of identifying what he had done wrong, or – failing that – an efficient exit. "Come with me. Supply run."

Deke was unsure what we was expected to contribute to a supply run. He was a pair of hands, sure, but Yo-Yo had robot hands which were much, much stronger than his puny flesh ones. He also didn't know the names of most of the foods of the past, nor the norms regarding what could and could not be touched (Or sniffed. Or licked.) in a store. Still, the agents from the past (now present) didn't usually seem to _want_ his company, and this was an actual invitation. Deke stood, grabbing his red-brown leather jacket.

The Lighthouse received regular deliveries of staples, and although it was capable of self-sustaining recycling of water and sewage, it was hooked into municipal utilities when not in emergency mode. While the agents could live indefinitely on freeze-dried rations, they didn't particularly want to. So, every few days, someone took a grocery list and drove into town for produce, cold cuts, eggs, yogurt, cheese, Mack's preferred brand of breakfast cereal, sesame seed bagels, feminine hygiene products, and the one kind of American beer that Fitz found tolerable.

And magazines. Trashy ones. That was always a hot item.

Deke clambered into the passenger's seat of the unmarked S.H.I.E.L.D. truck that Yo-Yo had claimed. He watched her buckle herself in and worked out his own seatbelt by analogy. "These are internal combustion engines, right? Burning carboniferous fuels?"

"It's a truck," said Yo-Yo mildly. "It runs on gas." She sounded faintly impatient with him, but that was her baseline attitude, so Deke ignored it.

The drive wasn't very long, but Deke was plastered to the window the whole way. He wanted to know the exact types of trees. (Yo-Yo had no idea.) He was enthralled by the presence of so many people in such low density. Their cars passed by with no recognition. They walked along the sidewalk, clearly unaware of one another. They had privacy. They had space.

Deke was amused by modern clothing and hair styles – the diverse colors and shapes, in contrast to the utilitarian future's filthy scraps or S.H.I.E.L.D.'s muted blacks and grays. In his experience, clothing marked your status, not your personal style. There were white servitors' robes in contrast with everyone else's mismatched coverings. The degree of grime was a reliable indicator of the type of job you held. The soundness of the patches and replaced buttons said something about your dexterity with a sewing needle, or at least your ability to curry favor with someone who had that particular skill. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s uniforms meant things too, although the agents all seemed to have several different outfits for different purposes: formal suits, sleepwear, tactical gear, lab coats. Clothing, Deke concluded, must be plentiful (although he wondered whether there was a shortage of XXL menswear, or if Mack just preferred to wear extremely tight shirts).

Deke also made a point of watching Yo-Yo operate the vehicle. The controls were simple, but that didn't mean the function of every lever and pedal was immediately transparent, nor were the various customs that apparently governed motor vehicle use, most of which appeared to be centered around preventing collisions. Since the vehicles couldn't move in three dimensions, this required elaborate rules for waiting in line and taking turns. Deke jotted down a mental note to teach himself driving laws.

Yo-Yo parked at the supermarket and hopped down from her seat. She pointed to a cart corral. "Get one for us."

Deke did as he was told, eager to enter the building. The outdoors still unnerved him. Too many unguarded directions, and no matter how much he told himself that gasses had mass and were bound by gravity, there seemed to be nothing sealing the air in. They made their way through the automatic doors and inside.

Yo-Yo took a hand-written list out of her pocket. "You probably don't know what half this stuff looks like, so we'll go together this time. Maybe next time we split up. Finish faster."

"I can-"

But before Deke could protest his capability, Yo-Yo made a sound of disagreement and held the list out of Deke's reach. "We start with produce."

Like many grocery stores, this one had a few special sale items at the front. Beyond that, looking between the cash registers, shoppers could see the aisles of dried and canned foods. Heading right, the store opened into a large array of fruits and vegetables. It was bordered on the far side by fresh fish, meats, and cheese, and to the left by a bakery area with breads and cakes.

Yo-Yo looked at the list. "Simmons wants green grapes. Mack wants red. If they're not too expensive, we get both." She began sifting through the plastic bags, looking for ones that were both the right size and fully ripe. She walked her finds back over to the cart. "We need eggplant, carrots…" She skimmed further down. "10 pound sack of potatoes. You get that." She pointed to the display of potatoes and onions, instructing Deke to select one of the identical paper bags.

Deke didn't move.

"Hey," said Yo-Yo, waving her hand in front of his face. "If I wanted this to take forever, I would have brought Mack."

Deke was gripping the shopping cart very tightly, breathing noisily and looking rapidly at all the different foods arrayed before him.

"You okay?"

"I need to- I can't-" Deke turned and ran out of the store.

Yo-Yo followed at a leisurely pace. She knew what this was, and that it was not an emergency. She politely moved the cart to the side of the aisle and backtracked to the entranceway. There were two sets of sliding doors, to minimize heating or cooling loss, with an alcove between them, largely full of more shopping carts. Yo-Yo started to exit the building, to look for Deke in the parking lot, but knowing Deke's distrust of open sky, she reconsidered and looked back to the carts. And there was her shopping companion, in the corner, crouched between the carts and the wall, having a full-blown panic attack.

Yo-Yo sighed internally, wishing he had picked a more convenient location, but she was smaller than he was. If he could fit in there, so could she. So she wriggled between the carts and the wall, sitting down on a rubber bumper that formed a side railing.

"It's a lot, isn't it?" she asked.

"How is there- You can just buy- Piles of it, of everything. Never seen that much in my life. How can there be- People starved! And then there's just this. All of this. And it's just normal, isn't it? To you? To people now? Just millions of calories of the-" Deke had to stop his already disconnected rant, because his hyperventilation was incompatible with speech. Tears stung at his eyes, but he was too busy freaking out to protect his masculine pride by hiding them from Yo-Yo. "How can there be so _much_?" he asked between gasps. "I mean, I suspected. The kinds of foods you all were eating. What you threw away." He hiccupped, no longer remotely successful at hiding his outflow of emotion.

Yo-Yo just waited. She wasn't particularly good at comforting others, but she knew from experience that silent company offered some amount of emotional support.

Deke hiccupped again. "That didn't look very…cool."

"No, it did not."

"You're not gonna tell the others about it, right?"

"You know, they might like you more if you were less cool and more…someone who is bothered by stuff like this."

"Really? You think so? Because I don't have to be cool all the time. I mean, I'm not. I mean, I am cool but-"

"No," interrupted Yo-Yo. "Maybe not."

"You knew," said Deke, his breathing gradually returning to normal. "You knew this would happen."

"I wasn't sure. I guessed. Same thing happened to me. Thought it would be better if you were with friends the first time you saw."

"You felt like this, too?"

Yo-Yo nodded. "Probably not as strong a feeling as you. Before I came here, I saw America on the TV, so it wasn't such a big surprise."

"Does it stop happening?"

"Yeah. You get used to it. You must be able to handle changes. You never would have made it otherwise."

"Where you're from," said Deke, "there's not enough food?"

"Sort of." Yo-Yo shook her head no. "There is- there is- I wish I could show you Colombia. Maybe I will sometime. It's very far south of here. Two and a half thousand miles."

Deke looked upward, placing the country on his mental map of the globe. "That's on the other side, right? The other side of the, uh, the middle."

"Equator. It's mostly north of the equator. Just a tiny bit in the Southern hemisphere."

"Right." Deke mouthed 'equator', storing the term for future use.

"Anyways, it's beautiful. Very green. Everything grows. There is no reason there would not be plenty of food. But you make more money growing coffee than food. And even more growing cocaine. And even then, you could sell it and buy food, but they buy guns instead. Because everyone else buys guns, so you buy them too. And you buy guards and fences. So everyone else buys them too. There's so much violence. Rebels, gangs, cartels, police. They all take a cut. It's just normal. So trade is not… When I walked into a place like this, the first thing I thought was how easy it would be to rob." She swallowed heavily. "I never starved. But there were times when food was a decision, an effort, not just…" She gestured to the groceries around her, "This…all the choices, fresh and safe and simple."

Deke's breathing was gradually returning to normal. "I'd like to see Colombia sometime. If we can't go for real, maybe you could show me on a computer." His posture straightened. He shifted his jaw back and forth, the way he always did when thinking. "I know what coffee is, but what's cocaine?"

* * *

"This is pitaya, Americans call it 'dragonfruit'. I grabbed it while you weren't looking." They were in the kitchen at the base, having just finished unloading groceries. Yo-Yo held out a small bowl that contained a halved fruit, red on the outside, and white with black speckles on the inside. "I tricked you. This is Colombian fruit to say sorry."

Deke took the can cautiously. After his panic attack, they had finished their shopping. Deke had still felt overwhelmed, but he had given himself a job, to breathe at a steady rate and act studiously normal while following Yo-Yo as she collected all the items on her list. Passing through the endless aisles of luxuries, the temptation to steal had been practically irresistible, so he had jammed his hands in his pockets, aware that he probably looked like someone who needed a…what had Daisy called herself when she picked him up from jail…a social worker?

He tried a bite. It was amazing. Of course it was. Everything in the past was amazing. "Are you going to tell the others?"

"I told Mack. And Simmons."

"Great," groused Deke, trying hard to look grumpy while eating delicious tropical fruit.

"They were there when it happened to me. It wasn't bad. They wanted to help."

Deke strongly suspected that 'it' happening to Yo-Yo didn't involve crying and hiding behind shopping carts, but he got a bit more pleasure out of his next bite of pitaya.

"Talk to them. You don't have to face all the new things alone."

Yo-Yo left.

Deke enjoyed his dragonfruit.


End file.
